the later 15th century · 1523 · 1557 Shepherds, then a village of the Humenné estatePastieri a potom dedina humenského panstva

In the second half of the fifteenth century a wave of settlement known as the Vlach colonisation moved along the Carpathian ridges — herding families, here mostly Rusyn, who took land that lay too high and too poor for wheat and lived off sheep, cattle and the forest. Medzilaborce is one of the villages that came out of it. The town takes 1523 as its first appearance in a document, while the standard dictionary of Slovak settlements records the form Mezeulaborc in 1557, when ten taxed holdings stood here. It was nobody's independent place: it belonged to the great Humenné estate of the Drugeth family, who held most of this corner of the kingdom.V druhej polovici 15. storočia sa po karpatských hrebeňoch šírila valaská kolonizácia — pastierske rodiny, tu prevažne rusínske, ktoré brali pôdu položenú privysoko a prichudobnú na obilie a živili sa ovcami, dobytkom a lesom. Medzilaborce sú jednou z dedín, ktoré z nej vzišli. Mesto si za prvú písomnú zmienku berie rok 1523, slovník obcí zaznamenáva podobu Mezeulaborc k roku 1557, keď tu stálo desať zdanených usadlostí. Samostatné to nebolo: obec patrila veľkému humenskému panstvu Drugetovcov, ktorí držali väčšinu tohto kúta kráľovstva.